It’s happening again, the eon in this human experience where my spirit and body no longer dance in harmony. I can taste on the tip of my senses that it is happening, because my body, this earthly home, begins to fall asunder, starting from this brain, the control centre. There’s a fog in my head, that’s the first sign. A tangible mass of shit that should not be there, like cotton. It feels like cotton. There’s nothing I can do to remove it. It’s not an itch I can scratch, not dust on my skin I can brush off, not a wound on my knee I can treat. It’s far beyond the reach of my hands, beyond the reach of me.  

The cloud sits in my head, engulfs my brain. It’s like a mass of junk stuffed into my free headspaces, leaving no space for anything else. I cannot think. There’s no room for my thoughts to move. They panic, frantic, stir up a ruckus, gasping for air, protesting against the fog. My head is full of cotton. It’s heavy, it’s heavy. 

Nothing makes sense that once made sense to me. I re-read messages from a conversation I was in before this started, but I cannot understand it. My friend, she’s still typing. A new message appears. It’s too long. I can tell she is talking about something simple, something I know of and can understand. But I don’t understand it. I do not recognise the words she says. All this, it happens within a matter of minutes. But the concept of time, it founders in these seas. 

I swipe the conversation away and open Twitter, where I have begun to share a lot of my musings, more unfiltered than it is in my nature to. I feel immediately removed from it. Everyone is talking, angry, arguing about this and that. And these conversations are immediately foreign to me, distant. I am aware I know of these things, understand them, these ideas, constructs, systems, concepts we talk about and define our earthly lives by. These things we have created to make the human experience more meaningful to us, lest we lose our minds. I watch on as they all speak about these made-up things, and disagree on these made-up things, and get riled up, and angry, and frustrated, and pained, at these made-up things. And I wonder why. I know I know why, in some distant way, but I still wonder why. None of it seems real, these things. 

I’m overwhelmed by the absurdity of it all as I scroll, and scroll. The fog sits thicker, thicker, wider, bigger, thicker, until there’s no space for me. I want to break free. From where? Through where? To where?  I lay down, breathe to clear the fog. They say it helps. But it doesn’t really. Less, and less, and less space for me… and I slip. Removed not only from the things I read which I know I understand but cannot understand at this moment, but removed from the body I once understood as an enclosed, unleavable thing.  

I am not my body, I realise, because I leave it. The fog, it pushes me out. It dawns on me that I am not what I thought I was. I observe it all from a distance, not very far off. Far enough that I know I am severed from my vessel, but close enough to know I am still associated with it in some form. I observe my body, observe my surroundings, all the surreal, made-up things riddling it.  

“Oh, you dissociate?” 

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what it is like to do that.” 

I describe it to her, my new friend. I made a new friend online. We speak deeply about things like we have known each other for years. I describe these moments where I writhe on my bed, uncomfortable within my body, the spaciness I feel. I tell her how I don’t feel ‘here’, that everything I once knew falls apart into its atomic forms before me, and I question the things I know I know because I don’t know them anymore although I know I know them.  

She listens without judgment. This is why I like her. She says casually, “Yes, that’s what it means to dissociate.” 

But I still don’t think so, although I do not have a name for these experiences of mine. My idea of dissociating is of the people with the many people within them. One leaves, one takes over. But me, I leave, and just leave. Nothing takes over, at least as far as I can tell. This new information scares me, the possibility of it, because it is not what I know. It is not what I know of myself, which is already too heavy for me to carry, too complex for me to understand, control. It scares me for a long time, what she said. 

My mother, she knows there’s something wrong. I can tell by the way she looks at me, the despair in her eyes. There’s a wall between me and her, invisible, yet made of a thousand solid pains. She sits on my bed and watches me. Her voice is loving, comforting. “Please, show me what to do.” It breaks, the wall, blown to smithereens, Jericho. Tears fall down my face, past the broken dam. They flow to the other side, where she’s stood for years, waiting. She holds me in her arms as I cry, and cry, and cry. Love flows from her body and into mine, in a language that transcends mere talking. She clears my table of the clutter drowning it, days and days of garbage, and decayed food. “When I come back, I’ll remove all these clothes on your bed.” 

“Love is healing,” I share online. And I know I do not mean it in any performative or woo-woo way, because I feel within my body that I am better than the time before she walked in, when I wailed, and cursed, and clawed at the barren store of love in my spirit. People are moved, and they comment, happy with this mother who holds her adult child in her arms as she cries, who cleans her adult child’s room, who recognises her adult child’s pain. They send me their love, their comfort, their kind words, their money, their love. “Get your head up immediately.” “Let me buy you lunch.” “What does support look like to you?”  

I marvel at the essence of community. It gives me strength for the morning, for I bathe with soap and a sponge today. I go outside for the first time in a long time. My clothes are not clean. I find a garden, and I bask in it in a joy I have never once felt before. My friend meets me. He listens to me ramble, watches me cry, listens to me ramble again. I know I say a lot of strange shit, but he never flinches. This is why I like him. We sit under the trees, heedless of time passing us by. We eat a lot of fried chicken, and chocolate, and ice cream. He takes a picture of me while I laugh and shows it to me. I do not feel associated with the face in the picture, its person. The mirth fades from my eyes as he leaves.  

When the darkness of night comes, my lover asks me, “would you like me to make you a sandwich?” We sit in a loud silence, looking, but not speaking. The air between us sits heavy, a medley of anger, and neglect, and anguish, and love, and love, and love. When I get home, I move aside the pile of clothes on my bed, and sleep. 

I feel good when I wake up the next day. I record it in my journal. 12:02 p.m. Trying to do some work! I open my laptop. 12:17 p.m. Feeling backseated again. Feels like I’m slipping farther back away. Far, far, away. I close my laptop. 12:something p.m. Crying, fighting it. I was okay minutes ago.  

2:something pm. I’m having such a hard time. 

I sip a brew of God’s plant, and observe myself ascend into a different state of consciousness, of being. 

My senses open up before me, acutely sentient of all that’s been there that I never perceived before. Music courses through my body, its waves of sound one with the wave of me. The taste of food is heavenly ambrosia upon my tongue. I feel grounded, in control, for the first time since this eon began. I smile, and laugh, for the first time since this eon began. I observe my ego fall away, and everything I once knew as a part of my self, with it.  

The next morning, I’m back from my ascent, plunged back into my reality, deeper in its throes. I write in my journal: feels like my brain is rotting. My internet friend sends me a message, the one who understands me. She talks about emotions, and the suppressing of them. I talk about emotions, and the expressing of them. I tell her about the episodes, the searing pain in my chest, the weight of the world on my shoulders, the meaninglessness of existence on my mind. I ruminate on the harrowing order of life, how it could have been engineered in an entirely different way, the evils of capitalism, and colonialism, and oppression, and religion, and discrimination, and the awful lack of love, of love, of love. I tell her about how it starts with a small sadness, and then spirals into a thousand heavy cares. 

She understands. 

Pain consumes me like a fire, eating away at my brain, at my heart, my body, beyond my body. I curse my very existence, which I do not have the courage to end, for I know well it never does. My body is too small a place for my being, too weak a vessel for its ways. It withers, it breaks, it breaks. My mother sees me, my hands on my head, my body on the kitchen floor. She holds me, she cries, I cry, as love pours from her body into mine, piecing me together.  

I go to stay with my friend, the one by the beach. I dip my body in the water, give myself to the sea as an offering. While I bathe, her waves speak to me, become one with me, and in that moment, I understand. That to leave my body is to be free.  

 My friend joins me in the water. “I see you blooming, friend,” she says. 

“One step forward, a million steps back.”  

But she shakes her small head. “To grow, friend, self needs to fall away. And you, my friend, you’re flourishing, you’re flourishing.” 

About the Author:

Audrey Obuobisa-Darko is a Ghanaian writer and video creator. She is pursuing an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she’s a Truman Capote Fellow. She is an alumna of the Caine Prize Workshop, Adventures Creators Program, and the Amplify HQ Fellowship for African Content Creators. She has two self-published books from her childhood, The Magic Basket, and Wahala Dey, for which she won the Young Icon Award at the Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah African Genius Awards, and 3rd Prize Bill Okyere Marshall Award. Audrey’s writing moves between the real and metaphysical, exploring mental illness, sexuality and queerness in Africa, religion, existentialism, and human connection. You can find her on Twitter @audreyobdarko and on IG @audreyobuobisadarko. 

*Feature image by Mads Schmidt Rasmussen on Unsplash